Major bombshell, and sorry, but this certainly requires a breaking tag as well: HP has announced it is discontinuing operations for webOS devices - effective immediately. Just like that... The TouchPad and Pre 3 are dead. Eh. Raise your hands if this brings back those painful memories of that infamous 'Focus Shift'. In addition, the company also announced its intention to sell its personal computer business.

Somethings not right here. You don't invest heavily in a new technology just to turn around and abandon it first moment some difficulties show up. They had to know this would be a hard sell and would take a year or two to penetrate the market. I mean they had to know this, right? According to this report, it basically means they gave up after less than two months!!!

Are the people running this business complete morons? Now they are going to spin off the PC business too?
Printers won't save them. Don't they know that the tablet is going to kill the printer? I see only one future for HP now. Watch that stock drop like a rock. They are selling out. Bye-bye HP.

P.S. I am so angry about you giving up on WebOS I could spit nails and will never buy another product of yours ever again and I will do my damndest to see no else does either. FUHP.

Hurd was NOT a great CEO! It only appears that way, but once you dig up the facts and talk to the people involved with HP, you'll quickly realize he's made major mistakes. I admit, not as horrible as Fiorina, but still, his decisions were not so favorable for the company. His relentless cost-cutting measures, for the most part, really did the most damage, especially to the R&D division. If a company won't spend on R&D, it might as well be dead, as it's only prolonging an inevitable failure.

I'm not saying I necessarily agree with Apotheker's decisions, but so far he seems to give good reasoning behind his actions and it appears the board members also agree with the direction he's taking with the company.

HP has a history of doing this to consumer technologies, so this was written on the wall before the ink on the contract was dry.

HP is crap on the consumer side. Their stuff has been under engineered and overpriced for years. Their business tech is pretty good, but not the consumer stuff.

WebOS would have been a contender if they would have been bought by a company that said, "Build cool stuff. Hardware releases every six months, software releases every three, go" they might have had a shot, but HP goes cheap.

Are the people running this business complete morons? Now they are going to spin off the PC business too?

Yes they are, and the PC arm has been bleeding for years. Only the profits from EDS and ProCurve were keeping HP in the black.

Services and enterprise equipment is what's going to save HP. Seriously, look no further then IBM for an example, and HP has a better hardware stack then IBM does. Let's look at an example between a tablet and a server.

You know, given the board collusion in a industry with basically just 4 players, I wouldn't be surprised if the CEO of HP was given orders by Google's board to pack it in, in exchange for perhaps job security or new opportunities that will pop up with just 3 players in the market.

Board collusion between companies is business as usual now in the USA and Europe. Monopoly laws are not enforced unless the company can't make the payments to the forces who decide whether or not there indeed _is_ a monopoly in a particular market.

Digitimes, a Taiwanese tech site, has been saying for months that HP is looking to sell off its PC business. I think they cited Samsung as a possible buyer. So really this is not as surprising as it looks.

IBM sold it's PC business to Lenova. HP will sell to some other Asian company. Pretty soon there won't be any US owned PC brands. It's only natural that things go this way because PC components have been manufactured in Asia for decades now.